New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

Sermo

February 15, 2008

The usual term for this phenomenon is “UGC”—user-generated content. I prefer the term customer-contributed content because it rolls off the tongue better and fits our definition of a customer as an end-user of the goods and services you provide (whether they or someone else pays for those services).

On February 6, 2008, the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) division of the American Association of Publishers held its annual symposium. For the second year, I was the moderator for a day of fascinating talks and case studies. The topic at hand was Cyberscholarship: Where are our users taking us? The objectives for the meeting were to gain a clearer sense of:

1) How do today’s readers, scholars, and professionals want to interact around professional and scholarly content?

2) How do they want to use and interact with published research?

3) How do they want to learn from each other?

The panelists included Kevin McKean, VP and Editorial Director of Consumers Union; Paris Patton, VP of consumer research firm Sachs Insights; Mark Ranalli, President and CEO of Helium; Melissa Burke, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Sermo; and Bryce Johnson, President and CEO of CafeScribe. What all of the panelists had in common was a passion to make it easy for customers to interact with and to contribute content.